“The Goddess Complex is a hilarious and painful satire, packed with cultural criticism about pregnancy and motherhood, centered on the adventures and hardships of an eccentric narrator who is contacted by her doppelgänger. Through these parallel lives and vivid writing the novel illuminates and surprises.”

—Alan Grostephan

“The Making of a Doctor: The Hidden Realities of Medicine by Michelle Izmaylov is an essay collection that earns this recognition with its precise and inviting prose. Here, she describes her life as the child of refugees: ‘I find countries that welcome me in the library, find a country with a pen, ink speaking into existence, a place where I am wanted.’ While shadowing a physician as a college student: ‘I follow him, and see him gathering stories in his hands, stories that he turns into the solutions his patients need.’

Memoirists are driven to tell their stories for various reasons including finding meaning from living through a prior trauma, sharing a unique experience, and the desire to inspire others. Izmaylov explicitly states that she’s driven by the latter. ‘I have had enough of a medical system that places profits ahead of people, where the country a patient is from…determines their treatment options, where a clinician can climb out of the darkness of depression that nearly pulled them beneath the ground to find their colleagues mocking patients who have mental illnesses in the workroom.’

Izmaylov doesn’t draw on her experiences only to examine the systemic problems of modern medicine but to locate herself within them. She captures her interior life as a medical student and resident by describing vivid encounters with patients, peers, and professors. She invites the reader to witness the gradual shaping of a medical self: how ideals are tested, how medical hierarchy quashes youthful optimism, and how responsibility grows. 

Izmaylov also exposes her own mental health challenges and how they complicate her training yet heighten her compassion. This collection shines with elevated storytelling as Izmaylov captures fatigue, doubt, and moral strain alongside the persistence required to continue. In doing so, the book documents not only what happens in the practice of medicine, but how those experiences contribute to forming a physician’s identity.”

—Mimi Zieman

“Sara Omer has managed to create a world as full of depth and history and mystery as the real-world multicultural inspiration she drew from to write The Gryphon King. Omer moves through the life-breathed details of such strange experiences as a pegasus flight with journalistic viscerality as transportative as cinematic features. The occupants of her world provide someone to root for, and one or two to curse, but they all behave as real and complex as historical figures weaving throughout mythologies and war might. The injection of creatures of bestiaries somehow feels both invigorating and well-founded, reminding readers Omer’s delicate unraveling of the layers beneath can never be predicted.”

—T.M. May

“A people’s history and culture are deeply intertwined with the food they eat—food, like language, is an essential feature of culture. In Georgia’s Historical Recipes, Valerie J. Frey applies the notion of foodways to an examination of local recipes found in cookbooks spanning more than two centuries from 1733--when Georgia was one of the 13 original British colonies--to World War Two. Drawing upon her extensive experience as an archivist at both the state and national levels, Frey takes us on a delightful journey that highlights a diverse range of culinary traditions as she tells a story about Georgia’s foodways that comprises multiple stories—English, indigenous, Gullah-Geechee, and more. The result is an impressive feat of research that provides both a deeply satisfying taste of regional history and a practical guide to cooking in the best of our state’s culinary traditions.”

—Albert Lee